


Tangent.

by Lapsed_Scholar



Category: The X-Files
Genre: (sort of), Astronomy, Cancer Arc, F/M, Friendship/Love, Season/Series 04, Stars, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 15:13:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15754287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lapsed_Scholar/pseuds/Lapsed_Scholar
Summary: A point of contact





	Tangent.

She is out of the hospital... for now. She’s still sick, though, and she’s fading quickly. She’ll be back before too long. But she’s so tired of hospitals, and she just wants to pretend for a bit that she’s strong and healthy again. Like she never will be again.

Mulder drives her home. He comes to the hospital, goes inside to meet her in the lobby. He doesn’t seem to have much to say—he’s trying and failing to mute the sorrow in his eyes. They walk back to his car in silence, shoulder to shoulder. Close, but not touching. The story of their lives, she thinks. She doubts she’ll live long enough to really touch him.

“Take me somewhere,” she tells him quietly, sitting in his passenger seat.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere. I’m just tired of being inside, in the same places.”

“If you’re hoping to chase a repulsive monster through abhorrent conditions, I don’t have any on deck right now. But I’ll see what I can do.”

They’re silent after that, but it’s a comfortable, companionable silence. She finds it soothing after the oppressive background noises of the hospital. She drifts off as he drives; she is tired.

She wakes up to a gentle shake of her arm. “Hey, Scully. If you still want to go somewhere, we’re here.”

She stretches, looks out the window. It’s dark and quiet. She can hear the crickets chirping in the early spring evening. Gently undulating hills fall away before her. They’re in the countryside—far enough from DC that the night sky is plainly visible, with its sprinkling of stars. It’s a clear night.

He produces a blanket from his trunk, and they walk a little ways where he unfurls it over the grass on the side of a hill. She sits down, and he drapes his jacket over her shoulders, gives them a brief squeeze before sitting next to her—close but not touching. They look at the stars. She can almost remember how the grass and countryside would smell. She can almost remember how the jacket covering her shoulders would smell like him.

“Do you know how they measure the brightness of stars?”

“Hmm.” Her answer is purposely noncommittal. She does know something about this, yes—her father was a Navy captain, after all, who had passed on his knowledge of the stars to his children, and astronomy was part of her undergraduate work. Still, she wants to hear Mulder tell it. He’s a skilled storyteller, and right now she wants the comfort of his poetic syntax and the soothing cadence of his voice.

“Well, our system is based on the Hellenistic Greek system attributed to Hipparchus. The visible stars were given a number between one and six: one being the brightest and six the faintest. A star with a brightness of one is twice as bright as a star with a brightness of two, and two is twice as bright as three.”

“A logarithmic scale,” she supplies, and she can feel his smile, even though she doesn’t look at him.

“Yeah, a logarithmic scale. Of course, the human eye isn’t all that sensitive, so they’ve done some refinement since then. And, even then, the distinctions that our eyes perceive as subtle can actually be vast. We’re not as perceptive as we like to think, and we let our inability to really see diminish the brilliance and complexity of the phenomena we profess to describe.

“Now, all of that is measuring apparent magnitude. Which is how the stars appear to us from our vantage point here on Earth. But our perspective is necessarily limited by where we are. It’s a scale based on the observer, rather than the subject. We’re... arrogant enough, maybe, to have based our earliest measurements on our own viewpoint—to have centralized ourselves in the vastness of the universe. Absolute magnitude accounts for actual distance—measures the hypothetical brightness of stars if they were all the same distance from Earth. Luminosity measures energy: The brilliance of a star, itself, without centralizing the perception of the observer.

“In the end, maybe it’s impossible for us to sum it all up, to categorize it all. We can only describe in our incomplete way and promise to ourselves to always keep trying. And yet, despite our limitations, humans have long relied on the stars that we will never fully see. Mapped entire mythologies and navigation systems to the small smattering of light that we are able to perceive. The stars are always there for us, constant. And, as miserable and small as our understanding might be, being without them is inconceivable.”

She knows,  _knows_ that he’s looking at her as he says this, probably has been for several minutes now.

There are tears running down her cheeks. She can’t look at him, keeps her eyes fixed on the sky. She has no words. There is no reassurance she can offer and no absolution he would accept. Her future is written and closed, even if he refuses to believe it.

But they have become experts at reading the significance of oblique conversations and words left unsaid.

She leans into him a little. Touching, now, at a single point.

He kisses her temple. They stare into the sky.

**Author's Note:**

> Oddly enough, this used to be the ending of the fourth chapter of "Variations." It didn't fit there, so I excised it, but I liked it enough to finish it into its own vignette.


End file.
